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Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany

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Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany
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Comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany occur frequently in the political discourse of anti-Zionism and part of the broader criticism of Israel.[1][2] Given the legacy of the Holocaust, the nature of these comparisons, and particularly whether they constitute antisemitism, is a matter of ongoing debate.

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22 October 2023: Pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Columbus, Ohio, displaying a poster that reads "Isreal [sic] are the new Nazis" amidst Gaza war protests in the United States.

Comparisons between Zionism and Nazism have been made by academics,[3] politicians[4] and public figures, both Jewish and not,[5] since before the establishment of Israel.[6][7][8] Some scholars suggest these comparisons can be rhetorical tools without any specific antisemitic intent, or that they can be an informed and necessary response to Israeli policies or actions.[9][10] Others state such comparisons lack historical and moral equivalence, risk inciting Jew-hatred, and may serve as a form of Holocaust inversion,[1] denial or minimization.[11]

During the 20th century, a wide variety of political figures and governments, especially those on the left, have invoked comparisons between Israel or Zionism and Nazism.[12] In the 21st century, politicians who have made such comparisons include Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,[13] Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,[14] Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez,[15] Colombian President Gustavo Petro,[16] and others.[1]

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20th century

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1940s

Comparisons between Zionism and Nazism predate the foundation of Israel in 1948. In 1945, British Army officer and politician Edward Spears compared political Zionism to the Nazi idea of Lebensraum.[4][6] German-Jewish linguist and anti-fascist Victor Klemperer, who survived the Holocaust and chose not to move to Israel but to stay in Germany after 1945, wrote in his LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii (The Language of the Third Reich) that both Zionism and Nazism are essentially neo-Romantic nationalist ideologies.[7][8]

In 1948, Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein and a number of other Jewish public figures signed an open letter which compared Tnuat Haherut, an early Jewish nationalist political party founded by Menachem Begin, to Nazism.[5][17] Arendt's views on Zionism and Israel varied widely over time, while Einstein supported the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but not that of a Jewish state.[18][19]

English historian Arnold J. Toynbee originally compared Zionism to Nazism, but later reconsidered this view.[20][3][21] Following critical responses by Jacob Talmon and Eliezer Berkovits, Toynbee decided his prior condemnation of Zionism was disproportionate in this regard.[22]

1960s

In the context of the Six-Day War, official statements by the Soviet Union administration compared Israeli tactics to those of Nazi Germany during the Second World War.[12] After the victory of Likud in the 1977 Israeli legislative election, Holocaust metaphors began to be used by the Israeli right-wing to describe their left-wing opponents.[23]

1980s

Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz introduced the term "Judeo-Nazis", suggesting that continued military occupation of the Palestinian territories would lead to the moral degradation of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), with individuals committing atrocities for state security interests.[24][25] In 2018, Noam Chomsky said of Leibowitz's prediction, "I think that's what you are seeing in Israel."[26]

In 1983, anti-Zionist scholar Boaz Evron said that Zionists should not lose sight of morality in pursuit of a political framework, explaining: "A society that loses its human image has no right to exist, in the long run, as we have seen in the case of Nazi Germany". He said that if such a regime were established in Israel, it would mean "the end of the State of Israel".[27] Later that year, University of Bridgeport international law professor Richard Arens, the brother of Israeli Minister of Defence Moshe Arens, compared Israeli settlement to the Nazi lebensraum.[28]

In 1983, the American freelance journalist Lenni Brenner published Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, in which he argued that Zionist leaders collaborated with fascism, particularly in Nazi Germany, in order to build up a Jewish presence in Palestine.[29]

During the First Intifada, Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov criticized Yitzhak Rabin's call to "break the bones" of Palestinians and wrote him a letter arguing that, based on Bartov's research, the IDF could be brutalized in the same way as the German Army was during World War II.[30] In 1988, Holocaust survivor Yehuda Elkana warned that the tendency in Israel to see all potential threats as existential and all opponents as Nazis would lead to Nazi-like behavior by Jews.[31]

Holocaust historian John K. Roth was involved in a controversy when he wrote in a 1988 op-ed comparing the Israeli right's proposal to expel Palestinians to Nazi policies, suggesting that just as "Kristallnacht happened because a political state decided to be rid of people unwanted within its borders", the same impulse could lead to atrocities committed by Israel.[32]

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21st century

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"Israeli soldiers are just following orders" by Carlos Latuff

Israel

During the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, settlers donned yellow stars to compare themselves to Holocaust victims as part of their protests against the disengagement.[25] In a 2012 article for Haaretz, Israeli academics (and former IDF soldiers) Nuphar Ishay-Krien and Yoel Elizur quoted an anonymous soldier who served during the First Intifada as saying, "I felt like, like, like a Nazi ... it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews."[33]

In 2016, Yair Golan, the Israeli general and deputy chief of staff of the IDF, sparked a controversy during a speech at Yom HaShoah. Golan alluded to manifestations of processes that occurred in Holocaust-era Europe.[34][vague] After criticism by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Golan said that he did not intend to compare Israel to Nazi Germany: "It is an absurd and baseless comparison and I had no intention whatsoever to draw any sort of parallel or to criticize the national leadership. The IDF is a moral army that respects the rules of engagement and protects human dignity."[35] In 2019, he later again compared right-wing Israeli politicians to Nazis and warned that, amid the rise of Israeli right-wing parties, Israel's democracy could be exploited similar to the Nazis' rise to power in Germany. This drew criticism from the right in Israel.[36][37]

In an interview with Israeli Army Radio in November 2020, the prime minister's son, Yair Netanyahu, compared the Kibbutz Movement to Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the DPRK:

Kibbutzim are something that doesn't exist outside of North Korea. We always know how ideas for utopian societies end. In the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, there was a desire to create exemplary societies and utopian societies. It never ends well, the desire to engineer human society.[38]

In an interview with Kan radio in August 2023, former Israeli general Amiram Levin accused the IDF of being a "partner in war crimes" and argued that Israel's control of the West Bank is similar to Nazi Germany's discriminatory policies.[39]

In December 2023, during the Gaza war, the mayor of Metula David Azoulai said in an interview: "The whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz. Let it be a museum for all the world to see what Israel can do. Let no one reside in the Gaza Strip for all the world to see, because October 7 was in a way a second Holocaust." The remarks were condemned by a spokesperson for the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum who said they may sound like "a call for murder of the scale akin to Auschwitz".[40]

On 18 February 2025, Ofer Cassif, a far-left politician of the Knesset and member of the Hadash–Ta'al party, tweeted a comparison between Israel's plans to encourage voluntary migration of Palestinians from Gaza and the flight of the German Jews to other countries during World War II. His tweet was criticised by other Knesset members. For instance, Otzma Yehudit MK Almog Cohen filed a complaint to the Knesset Ethics Committee about "his vile and disgraceful comparison" and called Cassif a "terrorist supporter". In response, right-wing Knesset lawmakers called for Cassif's impeachment.[41]

Moshe Feiglin compared both Israelis and Palestinians to Nazis, saying: "As Hitler, may his name be erased, once said: 'I cannot live in this world if there is one Jew left in it,' we could not live in this land if even one such Islamo-Nazi remains in Gaza, and not before we return to Gaza and turn it into Hebrew Gaza."[42]

Palestine

In August 2022, the President of the State of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas, accused Israel of having committed "50 Holocausts" during a visit to Berlin, Germany. Abbas had responded to a reporter's question about the upcoming 50th anniversary of the 1972 Munich massacre committed by the internationally active Palestinian militant group Black September, who were at that time affiliated with Abbas' Fatah Party, and whether he intended to apologize for the attack.[43]

Olaf Scholz, the Chancellor of Germany, later condemned Abbas' remarks. He asserted, "Especially for us Germans, any relativization of the Holocaust is unbearable and unacceptable". The German publication Bild labeled the incident as antisemitic.[43][44] In response, Abbas said his answer was not intended to deny the singularity of the Holocaust, which he stated that he condemned in the strongest terms, but that he had intended to discuss the "crimes and massacres committed against the Palestinian people since the Nakba at the hands of the Israeli forces" in his view.[45]

Comparisons between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto

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This famous photograph from the Warsaw Ghetto has been used in multiple artworks opposing Israeli violence in Gaza.[46]

In a testimony published by Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence, an IDF soldier who served in Operation Protective Edge during the 2014 Gaza War recounted Israel's attacks on Beit Hanoun by saying:

There's that famous photo that they always show on trips to Poland (organized trips in which Israeli youths visit Holocaust memorial sites) that shows Warsaw before the war and Warsaw after the Second World War. The photo shows the heart of Warsaw and it's this classy European city, and then they show it at the end of the war. They show the exact same neighborhood, only it has just one house left standing, and the rest is just ruins. That's what it looked like.

— [47]

According to Martin Shaw, the comparison to the Warsaw ghetto used to be somewhat hyperbolic but has become more accurate as a result of the Gaza genocide after October 2023.[48] Rebecca Ruth Gould argues that the comparison "can become a means of resisting the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza".[49]

Rest of the world

On 18 February 2024, the President of Brazil, Lula da Silva, was criticized by The Times of Israel for comparing the actions of Israel in the Gaza war to the Holocaust.[14] In April 2025, Vanina Biasi, an Argentinian lawmaker of the far-left Workers' Party was indicted by Federal Judge Daniel Rafecas for her tweets referring to Israel as a "fascist" and "Nazi" state and describing Israel's war on Gaza as a "Holocaust".[50]

In May 2023, Tunisian President Kais Saed said, "While Tunisians protected Jews during the Holocaust, today elderly women and children are being bombed in Gaza."[51][52][53] Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, said such remarks incited hate against Tunisian Jews.[54]

Turkey

In April 2016, Turkish-born Swedish politician Mehmet Kaplan, who served as the Minister of Housing, was forced to resign after a video surfaced from 2009, where he said: "Israelis today treat Palestinians in a very similar way to how Jews were treated in Germany in the 1930s."[55][56][57]

In July 2018, following the Israeli government's adoption of the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said the "spirit of Hitler" lives on in Israel, saying there was "no difference [exists] between Hitler's obsession with a pure race and the understanding that these ancient lands are just for the Jews". He also called Israel "the world's most Zionist, fascist, racist state". The statements were condemned by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who described Erdoğan's rule as "a dark dictatorship" and stated that Erdoğan "is massacring Syrians and Kurds and has jailed tens of thousands of his own citizens".[13][58]

United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, erstwhile Member of Parliament for Bradford East, the Liberal Democrat politician David Ward was criticized after writing in the ceremonial Book of Remembrance in the Houses of Parliament on Holocaust Memorial Day 2013: "I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new state of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza." He later said that "a huge operation out there" had distorted what he meant.[1] As a result, the Liberal Democrats' leadership threatened Ward with formal disciplinary action over his comments.[59]

Roger Waters of the British rock band Pink Floyd has repeatedly compared Israel to Nazi Germany. In a 2013 interview with CounterPunch, he accused "the Jewish lobby" of being very powerful in the United States and said, "There were many people that pretended that the oppression of the Jews was not going on. From 1933 until 1946. So this is not a new scenario. Except that this time it's the Palestinian People being murdered."[60][61] In The Observer, American rabbi and writer Shmuley Boteach said this comparison was antisemitic.[62] In a 2017 hour-long video live chat on Facebook, Waters again compared Israel to Nazi Germany.[63]

United States

In a Netflix special, comedian Dave Chappelle made a joke about William Ellison, a former slave in South Carolina who later went on to own slaves, saying: "And shockingly, they're making a movie about him. Ironically, it's called 'Space Jews.'" The UK-based Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) denounced the joke, saying it implied that "Jews subject others to the atrocities that they suffered in the Holocaust" and "plays on the ignorant prejudices of his audience."[64]

Jewish actor Wallace Shawn said in a 2025 interview with Katie Halper that Israel is "doing evil that is just as great as what the Nazis did". Shawn added: "In some ways it's worse, because they kind of boast about it. [...] The Israelis are almost proud of it, and it's demonically evil."[65][66]

Jake Romm, in an article for Parapraxis on the role of the Shoah in Zionism, wrote: "The Shoah was present for the early Zionist perpetrators of the Nakba both as the crime to be avenged and the model for the barbarity—and efficacy—required to carry that vengeance out."[42]

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Academics worldwide have debated whether comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are inherently antisemitic or not.[67] Lesley Klaff and Bernard-Henri Lévy argue that comparing Israel to the Nazis lacks historical and moral equivalence, and risks inciting anti-Jewish sentiment.[68][1] Historian Bernard Lewis suggests that the belief that the Nazis were no worse than Israel also provides "welcome relief to many who had long borne a burden of guilt for the role which they, their families, their nations, or their churches had played in Hitler's crimes against the Jews, whether by participation or complicity, acquiescence or indifference".[68]

The Working Definition of Antisemitism – adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the U.S. Department of State, and other organizations – offers several examples to help determine when criticism of Israel may be antisemitic, including "drawing comparison of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis".[69] Critics of the definition say that it could define legitimate criticisms of Israel as antisemitic and that it has been used to censor pro-Palestinian activism, in particular. Alternative definitions such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism have been proposed instead on this basis.[70]

According to political scientist Ian Lustick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, such comparisons are "a natural if unintended consequence of the immersion of Israeli Jews in Holocaust imagery".[9] British scholar David Feldman suggests that comparisons in relation to the 2014 Gaza War were not motivated by a broader anti-Jewish subjectivity but by targeted criticism of Israeli policy in military actions.[71]

In Austria, while overt antisemitism has been limited following the Holocaust, the Freedom Party of Austria has used comparisons between Nazi Germany and Israel to delegitimize its political opponents.[72] In Israel, Lustick reports that many Israelis are "already repelled by actions against Palestinians they cannot help but associate with Nazi persecution of Jews".[34] Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov has drawn an analogy between the German army's dehumanization of its enemies under Nazism and the attitudes displayed by young Israeli troops in the 2024 Gaza war.[10][61]

Holocaust inversion

Comparisons between Israel and Nazism have been described as a form of Holocaust trivialization called "Holocaust inversion".[68] Author Yossi Klein Halevi said the comparison was a form of Holocaust conversion based on the dehumanizing trope of "the Jew as embodiment of evil", now transferred to "the satanic Jewish state". Halevi said "the Jew-as-Nazi is the endpoint of political supersessionism", in which Jews assume "the identity of our worst enemy".[73][74]

Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism, says Holocaust inversion is a "soft-core" form of Holocaust denial, as contrasted with the "hard-core" denial practiced by David Irving, which "dilutes what the Holocaust was" by using a false comparison.[11] Kenneth L. Marcus says it aims to "shock, silence, threaten" Jews who support Israel, and "insulate, and legitimize" antisemitism, because it implies the subject deserves some form of punishment and they can disguise it as criticism of Israel instead.[75]

Eyal Levin suggests that Holocaust inversion is becoming part of the iconography of a new antisemitism which has spread globally – particularly in the Arab and Muslim world and in Western Europe and America – often appearing in demonstrations and media portrayals.[76] Bernard-Henri Lévy says this erodes societal safeguards by providing "an entirely new way of justifying" antisemitism that is subtler than yelling "Money Jews" or "They Killed Christ".[citation needed]

Writing in The New Yorker, Ian Buruma says that comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany "are too easily drawn, with too much self-righteousness, as though the guilt for what was done to the Jews could be lightened just a little by likening them to their own murderers. As the German Jewish journalist Henryk Broder once said, “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”"[77]

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